Written in February 2020 Thoughts and reflections on re sensitizing to emotion and expressing feelings.
Emotions are part of life.
Emotions happen while we’re doing everyday living.
Emotions are normal.
Emotions range from pleasurable to painful.
Emotions are part of us and part of the enjoyment and experience of life.
Emotions happen all day every day.
Some emotions have been stuffed down deep and the denial, facade, control, numbness or other emotional avoidance techniques, create the illusion of being unemotional (e.g. depressed). Even in this state, emotions are still there but heavily suppressed.
Being emotional is a normal part of life, something to value and express.
God made each of His children to be 100% emotional beings.
Emotions are a vital part of being ourselves, they are a way to experience the world and express ourselves. Emotions are the way we converse and interact, the way we connect with God, ourselves, others, creatures and the Universe. For example: Love is an emotion, if we shutdown emotion we will not experience the feeling of love.
Feeling emotion has benefits, for example:
- increased happiness
- smoother day to day experiences
- greater understanding of self and others as one becomes sensitive to feeling emotion
Denial and trying to control emotion are ways to shut down feelings and self expression. Shutting down emotion shuts down every emotion from joy and happiness to pain, it is not a selective process. Shutdown is shutdown.
Facade, a figment that is constructed, an image or visage created (mainly for ourselves) of what we would like to believe we are, and believe we feel.
Facade is a way to avoid how I truly feel.
We often believe that the facade is better than the reality of our emotionally injured self.
We maintain the false belief that facade is more palatable than the reality of what is felt and what we truly feel and believe.
Facade is the tendency to pretend rather than be ourselves in our injured gory.
I find emotions happen naturally, they come up as I live my life each day.
I am an emotional being.
I think back to when I was young, how I was taught to judge emotion and apologize for how I felt, what I thought, who I am.
At first, I often felt scared of emotion, or angry at emotional people, and angry at myself for expressing emotion. These were taught responses as I grew from an infant into a woman. The anger a way to feel momentarily powerful and control my own and others response. A way to avoid other, deeper, emotions.
When I began exploring my emotions I had to start right back at the beginning. I went back to a skill I had been born with. Feeling my feelings was natural when I first entered the world, it was my only communication system, the way I knew to interact and express myself, a way of release.
I was born humble but was unaware.
As an adult emotion felt like an almost forgotten experience. This was understandable after the years of training in how not to express myself. Humility had definitely not been encouraged or developed.
I have relearned:
- what emotions are
- what emotions I had/have
- how I feel and felt about this, that and the other
- how I uniquely express my feelings and emotions
- re sensitized to my feelings and emotional experiences
At first I thought I had to stop everything, pause my whole life and focus on only feeling my emotions. I was consumed by ‘trying’ to be emotional and ‘trying’ to express myself. It never worked, I wasted time, felt very little, didn’t grow, instead I disengaged from life.
The more I engaged life, interacted with people, explored things I liked doing or thought I might like doing.
The more I engaged many, varied experiences, the more emotions were exposed (came up naturally).
I had responses to what happened in my life.
I had feelings that came up during conversation.
Emotions came up and were easily felt when I was sensitive to them.
As emotion came up I took time (sometimes lots of time) to feel what I felt and expressed the emotions I had in a loving manner (not taking them out on others). This was different to stopping my life and self absorbedly focus on emotions. There is a difference between pausing life to feel through emotion that comes up and disengaging from life and waiting for emotions to come up.
One is honoring the emotional experience and loving self by giving time to feel through an issue. The other is about avoiding life.
I spent years judging my emotion and experiences. What a waste of time, as this was a technique to avoid feeling. I had false beliefs about emotion. For example, a false belief was that emotion made me irrational and illogical. Ironically the more I felt, allowed and was my emotional self the more logical, rational and clear I am.
Many things I was taught, absorbed and thought about emotion has turned out to be false. For example, my false beliefs included: emotion is never ending, emotion makes you unreliable. From experience I can say that the opposite is true. When emotion flowed pain was finite, feeling emotion made me reliable, happier more connected to myself, others and the environment. I have found expressing emotion has opened me up to feeling real joy and happiness.
Truth has changed my life. Being told or discovering truth cuts through the surface worries and fears so I can focus on the real issues and pursue the causes rather than remain dabbling in effects. I am able to see my situation more clearly.
Being honest, saying how I felt, feeling my feelings in the moment broke down resentment.
Expressed rage in the privacy of my bedroom made me less volatile in the moment with others.
As I have chosen to feel emotion my lifestyle has changed, I have made time and space to feel the feelings that get exposed in my every day interactions. Sometime I just feel as I work.
Taking the time to feel an emotion when it comes up is important. I used to bottle the feelings up and not let them out. Now I go to the public toilets or the car if I am town and let my feelings flow. Or I go to my bedroom at home and feel.
I have stopped conversations and left situations in order to feel. Where possible I return once I am done.
For me feelings come out in bits and pieces. When one is humble it is possible for emotion to happen all at once over a period of time, but I have to develop more humility for this to happen consistently.
Releasing emotional injuries and accepting God’s Truth is the only way to truly make change. Thus it is important to feel and change our relationship with emotion. God communicates via emotion which means I can receive God’s feelings on any matter if I am humble. And if I develop a relationship with God I have the opportunity to receive Love, Truth and answers to any question directly from God. Thoughts don’t make a situation different. But a relationship with God and feeling and releasing emotional causes will change your life.
I passionately desire to be as God created: 100% emotional. I am curious, what will this feel like?
I am most grateful for the teachings of Divine Truth and the consistent truthful feedback I receive from my friends, Jesus and Mary.
Divine Truth Resources
DEAR GOD... 